Is there a way you can pull my kalidescape stuff from the features forum to here, and stick the microsoft screen stuff in a new thread. I hope it wasn't totally my fault, but the subjects are all over the place, it's hard to keep track.

PS Can you please edit (or tell me how to edit) the title of this thread, I was up for a long time when I typed it, so some of the words got left in my head. It should have read "I have been working on a Kaleidescape Skin, I need some help thou.
Sorry.

MacGyver Wrote:I like a challenge (coding not people)
I only made mine because I was reading this post, and the link to the real website, and read the whole "..have a crew member fix it without you ever knowing there was a problem.." thing and got pissed off because of the smugness of the comment, so I coded their little interface in 30 min.
I'll post all the source I wrote, I like figuring out problems, and since I SUCK at artwork, it would be a waste for me not to give it to someone with better skills then myself to finish it.
Maybe my source will give him ideas, I come up with ugly wierd code that most people would say would work, but somehow does. (selftaught,sorry)
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I have started a skin as mentioned, but I like you, am a coder. My graphics skills suck!!! I wanted to create a Kaleidescape skin because it was clean with minimal eye candy, since I can't create eye candy:confused2:

I like your work and you have gotten alot farther than I have. I see that there is more skin engine development talk here than on x-b scene and I like that. jmarshall does a great job to post on both forums

I like the microsoft view that you created it looks awesome. Maybe we can throw some ideas together and create a skin that is clean, yet looks awesome.

I would say since the skin engine has many new excellent features being added one after the other, (Love you Jmarshall!) It would be best to go ahead and compile your own. The FAQ wiki helped me out on what I needed to find.
("VS.NET 2003 PRO", XDK (I think "XDK 5933" is the one being distributed now.) TortoiseSVN)
I don't think you'll need the PRO version, but thats the one I got and everything works like a charm.

There has been a python script around for quite a while on xbmcscripts.com called "Kaleidascrape" that adds Kaleidascape functionality to xbmc, and it's really pretty cool. What it does is you queue up a Video File, and then run the script, and it adds a few video files of your choice to the playlist before the originally queued file, and it plays them all. You can add a folder for Movie Trailers, a folder for those Audio Intros for Dolby Digital or THX or whatever, a folder for the Studio Intros, if you'd like, and also a folder for Home Theater Intros, and it chooses one or two random videos from all the folders, depending on how many you set it to, and those are the videos it adds before the feature presentation. For those of you wondering what i mean by Home Theater Intro, these are generally elaborate Cinematic sequences which start with "Welcome to the Smith Family Theater" or something like that and end with "And now, your feature presentation." You can get these customized especially for you (generally costs at least 25 bucks, and depending on teh quality, may cost over a 100 for extremely high end ones), or you can get generic ones for free that would work for anybody.

However, this script has since been broken by changes in the way xbmc handles playlists, along with other changes probably. Somebody though updated it a few months ago, and they also added a couple of new featuers, including the ability to enable a trivia slideshow thing like they have before movies start in theaters, which I thought was a pretty cool feature, and you can make it play music from a particular directory while doing the slideshow, so I put a bunch of music from various movies in a directory and bought a pack of slides for exactly this sort of application for about 3 bucks from a guy over on avs forums i believe and it works great. Also, this guy was attempting to add add a function where it would automatically connect to the apple movie trailer database and grab a couple of random trailers from the "New" category and automatically queue those up instead of Trailers on your hard drive. I don't know if he ever got this working, but it would also be a great feature.

Anyway, I think it would be a great script to try to integrate into the skin, and make it slightly more user friendly. Right now, you have to do a bit of XML editing to tell it where to find the various files and how many of each to play and so on. I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to just make this customizable from within the skin, something that could be found under "Skin Options" as seems to be the trend of the last few months.

Note that almost all of these have sample videos you can download, so if you don't care if the video is perfect and pristine DVD quality, you could just use these for free.

Here is a thread that shows you how to make your own pretty high quality intro with the name of your "theater" and everything in it for free :http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=715166
For a video of one of the many styles of intros you can make using this thread, check out the link here:
[url=http://interface.audiovideoweb.com/lnk/ca20win15017/GregPowers/Powers_Intro_DSL.wmv/play.asx][/url]

So, you could just integrate the script part, and add links to sites like these in the readme, instructing people how to go about adding their own intros. Anyway, its just a thought. I personally loved the Kaleidascrape script while it worked. It's amazing how jazzed for a movie some of those intro vids can get you.

I totally forgot to mention, that I think, though I'm not sure, that the updated script might be broken now too. I imagine that for anybody that knew python well could fix it fairly quickly, though I don't really know.